Smartphones, TVs, and tablets, are at the top of the shopping list for millions of Americans. This busy holiday season, shoppers will want to make sure their devices are equipped with the latest 4G technology, turn by turn navigation, voice to text, oh and Yttrium – a rare earth element that makes light in LED displays.

We use and depend on these technologies every day, yet how many of us would be able to name even one of the rare earth minerals that’s in everything from our latest tablet to our hybrid car? Not to mention knowing about the cancer-causing efforts required to mine these elements.

Kiera Butler, Mother Jones Senior Editor, traveled to Malaysia to report on the dirty mining and refining process employed to produce rare earth minerals for all the latest high-tech gear. Her story, “Is Your Smartphone Making Radioactive Waste?“, exposes how most rare-earth mines and refineries are relegated to the developing world, where lax environmental regulations allow companies to extract the valuable materials on the cheap.

Workers and locals are exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and toxic chemicals. Companies also leave behind a sometimes hazardous and toxic environment for the communities where these rare earths are mined.

Here are some excerpts from Butler’s article.

I have come to Malaysia because of my iPhone. I already knew that behind its sleek casing lurked a problematic history. I’d read the stories about Apple’s Chinese factories—about teenage girls working 15-hour shifts cleaning screens with toxic solvents, about suicides among exhausted workers whose lives are no longer their own.

But I had a much dimmer idea of my phone’s history before the Foxconn plant—where did those components they put together come from? What were its guts made of? My phone’s shady past, it turned out, began long before it was assembled in a Chinese factory. The elements used to power all our high-tech gadgets come from a very dirty industry in which rich nations extract the good stuff from the earth—and leave poor countries to clean up the mess.

………

A doctor from Kuala Lumpur tells me that he visited Bukit Merah to treat the eight children there who developed leukemia, seven of whom have died. Though there has never been a formal epidemiological study of the area, radiation exposure is a known cause of childhood leukemia, and no local I talked to could remember a single case of the disease before the plant opened.

………

I ask Esso Man about the white patches on his skin, which started appearing several years after he’d worked with Asian Rare Earth’s waste. His doctors speculate they might have to do with his exposure to radioactivity, he says, but they can’t be sure. Such medical guesswork is common in Bukit Merah, since no one has ever formally studied the impact of radiation exposure among the village’s 11,000 residents. (Mitsubishi denies any health effects.) And anyway, sometimes Esso Man thinks it might just be stress that’s causing his skin condition. “I feel regret about working for that company,” he says glumly. “I feel bad that I gave people all that toxic waste. Even my own uncle.” All of Esso Man’s drivers have died young—not one lived past his 50s. “I don’t know why they died and I am still alive.”

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Comments (1)

we never think about who we harm JUST MONEY which is why I am ashamed of humans and their very selfish ways I try to do my part but I doubt it makes a difference against the mega amounts of golddiggers we have smh..